Chapter 26: The Contradictions of Transubstantiation
which shall be shed for you": where He plainly extends His speech both unto the body which He then had, and unto the blood which He at the same hour possessed. For these glorified and impassible things He received not until the resurrection was past.
Chapter 26:
The Contradictions of Transubstantiation We argue, the conditions of the body passable and glorified are contrary one to another, so as they cannot both together at one time be in one subject.
Whereupon it follows that if ye will have them put into the body of Christ at one very time, ye make Christ's body to be twain. Experience and the histories teach us, that we must not allow of transubstantiation, because they write that Victor the Pope of Rome died by drinking of poison out of the chalice. And Henry the Emperor was poisoned by taking of bread in the Eucharist. If all things are there transubstantiated, and that only accidents are remaining, how may these things be?
We know that every one of the Sacraments (as the adversaries themselves speak) consist of matter and form. The matter, they say, is the signs or elements, but the form they say is that which is added by the word. But that which is compounded of the two, must not cast away the one, so as nothing thereof should remain but accidents: otherwise the nature of composition and conjunction would not be kept. Therefore it is concluded that the substances of bread and wine do remain. And before they are aware, the body of Christ is by them deprived of quantity, place, and distance of parts, so as His whole body is constrained to be in the least piece thereof.
Chapter 27:
The Mystical Body This Sacrament is not only called the Sacrament of the body of Christ our
Savior, but also of the mystical body: wherefore Paul in the first Epistle to the Corinthians said: "Ye be the body of Christ": and again, "We that are many, be one bread and one body, which be partakers of one bread." And Augustine in his 22nd book De Civitate Dei, the 10th Chapter, saith that Christians do not offer sacrifice unto Martyrs. The sacrifice undoubtedly is the body of Christ, which is not offered unto Martyrs, because they themselves be the same, to wit, the body of Christ. Wherefore seeing this
Sacrament is of both the bodies, even as they appoint not that the bread should be transubstantiated into the body mystical: so it may not be required that it should be truly and properly converted into the body of the Lord, seeing it is declared to be the Sacrament as well of the one as of the other.
And of this opinion it would follow, that as well the faithful as the unfaithful do receive the body of the Lord, which I have elsewhere disproved by two reasons. First, that seeing the body of Christ is not plucked away from the spirit of Christ, it would follow that the wicked should receive the spirit of Christ. Secondly, seeing infidels be dead as touching the inward man, they altogether want the instrument whereby they should receive spiritual things. And Augustine plainly said: that none do eat the body of Christ, but they which be of His body. And Jerome in the fourth book upon Jeremiah the 22nd Chapter: And whereas he infers: They shall not eat and drink, he understands the body and blood of our Savior. And he spoke of the Heretics. And the same Father upon Isaiah the 66th Chapter:
While they be not holy in body and in spirit, neither do they eat the flesh of Jesus nor do drink His blood. And many such like places are had out of the Fathers.